Category Archives: Columbia College

Summer in academic archives is just as busy as the regular school year. Researchers visit from near and far. Campus faculty and staff retire, units move; we collect records. We prepare archival material for exhibitions and anniversary celebrations for the … Continue reading →

Last winter, I spent a month processing our new Harrington College of Design special collection. These books belonged to the Harrington College library until 2015, when the college announced it would close. Columbia College Chicago acquired the books, as well … Continue reading →

As I’ve begun to process our Early Photography Collection, one item immediately piqued my interest. The collection is comprised mostly of commercial photography projects: a lot of daguerreotype, ambrotype, carte de visite, and a few tintype portraits which … Continue reading →

By: Matt Carlton, Cultural Studies Student In a semester of immediate information overload and systemic ties to academic neatness, an internship at the archives disguised an opportunity to start thinking about a process (archiving) so refined and polished at the … Continue reading →

Found in our unprocessed Center for Book & Paper Arts Collection, A Canterbury Christmas or A True Relation of the Insurrection in CANTERBURY on Christmas day last, with great hurt befell divers persons thereby is not your average Christmas tale. With pressure from … Continue reading →

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and that means we’re getting closer and closer to the biggest gift-giving holidays of the year. I’ve never been great at giving gifts. If I stumble on something that one … Continue reading →

Inspired by a research question, Head Archivist Heidi Marshall and I sat down to discuss what Columbia was like around the turn of the 20th century. How were the administration, the curriculum, and the location of the school, then titled … Continue reading →

Being approached with the opportunity to process a collection was exciting. It was a task completely shiny and new, far from the procedural digitization and organization from before. Only one other student worker at the time had been working on one, … Continue reading →

By: Amara Andrew My palms were sweating, my heartbeat was racing and I felt like I was about to pass out. I was a nervous wreck when I was first approached about processing a collection for the archives. All that … Continue reading →

Flowing shapes. Loops and swirls. Unbroken lines of ink linking letters together to form words. Even if you don’t read cursive, you can still appreciate its swirling aesthetics, the art of the form. Acquiring the skill to write in cursive … Continue reading →